My 9/11 thought is not about terrorism, it's about one underexamined
poor response: Don't drastically tighten airport security measures but
then offer wealthy|privileged|not-obviously-muslim folks special
treatment by which they can get shorter lines.
(https://www.rants.org/2016/06/trusties_and_suspies/)

Malleable encryption again: "We present the ALTER attack that exploits the fact that LTE user data is encrypted in counter mode (AES-CTR) but not integrity protected, which allows us to modify the message payload."

Both the #internet and the #www are under attack right now https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/10/drms-dead-canary-how-we-just-lost-web-what-we-learned-it-and-what-we-need-do-next via Dr Roy Schestowitz

I have dreamt a dangerous dream...

When the US Government simply buys up a controlling share of the stock of Twitter on the open stock market through the DoD black budget, seats a bunch of lieutenant colonels on the board of directors of that company, and shuts the whole thing down for the sake of preserving our national security. Jim Geraghty's Morning Jolt from Friday (see http://www.nationalreview.com/morning-jolt/453392/russian-influence-facebook-ads-scapegoat) under "Who Really Controls the President’s Twitter Account?" is truly a scary read. He does put forward a truly plausible way Twitter could help cause an atomic conflict.

Might as well shut down Facebook for safety's sake too. The nightmare only had Twitter getting that fate. There's no reason really to leave Facebook out or to leave Google+ standing.

What is Dino?

Dino is a modern IM client using XMPP (Jabber) with support for both OpenPGP and OMEMO. It looks very nice and can already be used for chatting and group conversations. It is, however, not yet stable nor feature-complete. If you are looking for something like Conversations (Android XMPP client), but for the desktop, Dino is for you. If you like to have something more stable and feature-complete, try Gajim instead. I use both! :~)

Dino is written in C and Vala, uses the GTK+ UI toolkit and looks best in Gnome, XFCE, or other GTK+ based desktops. I heard about planned versions for Windows and MacOS, too, but don't hold your breath.

How to install Dino on Debian?

Since yesterday, the Dino IM client is available in the official Debian repositories, but so far only in the "experimental" distribution. To install it, Debian users have to:$ echo deb https://deb.debian.org/debian/ experimental main | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/experimental.list $ sudo apt update $ sudo apt -t experimental install dino-im

This should work on nine official and five unofficial architectures for at least unstable and testing. Not sure about stable. I'm pretty sure, that oldstable will not work.

Why the "-im" suffix for Dino in Debian?

There used to be another program, an "integrated MIDI piano roll editor and sequencer engine", by the same name in Debian. Many references to the old program still exist, so it would be problematic to recycle the name for a different purpose.

Well, there are a lot of *swift* packages in Debian, but they're mostly related to the Openstack thing, and Swift IM was there before Apple came with their "Swift" language, so it was not that used at the time of Swift IM's creation =)

And Swift IM _is_ in Debian and has been for a long time (included in Wheezy), it's just not in Debian 9. AFAIK the Debian package is maintained directly by upstream, maybe part of the process could be improved somehow...

I notice that it hasn't come back in buster, either, and has a couple of release critical bugs that have been open for about a year: that isn't exactly a good indicator of the health of a package; maybe upstream has just stopped caring about debian?

Write Your Member of Congress: Graduate Tuition is Not Taxable Income!

"Write Your Member of Congress: Graduate Tuition is Not Taxable Income!"

Write your member of Congress today and tell them that making graduate tuition waivers count as part of taxable income will spell doom for higher education in STEM in the US and threaten the US STEM workforce.
https://www.house.gov/representatives/find/
Here is my letter to Congressmen Pete Sessions and Sam Johnson:
Dear Congressman X:
As a researcher making breakthroughs in STEM, …

It appears the Senate version doesn't have this. Both have the 1.4% excise tax on college endowments. This is to prevent Yale/Princeton/Harvard turning into hedge funds that have small research institutes attached. Not all colleges or universities would be impacted. Boston.com was stating all of 3 years ago that Harvard's endowment in terms of dollars happened to be larger than the Gross Domestic Product of 90 countries (see: https://www.boston.com/news/business/2014/09/25/harvards-endowment-is-bigger-than-half-the-worlds-economies). Both chambers feel a minor amount of spending down of those endowments would serve the public interest. What's a million or two between friends, eh?

My personal policy preference in taxation is probably scary to many people. The USA has the most progressive tax system in the world. The more you make, the more you pay. If I had the chance to reform the tax code myself I would probably delete most of the individual provisions. Everything would come down to filing a Form 1040-EZ without credits or any deductions beyond the standard deduction. I would reduce the tax brackets to three which would reduce the progressivity and sadly match Europe a bit more. Self-employment and Household employer taxes would not be reported on a 1040 form but would be shuffled off to Business Master File taxes for them to handle. In this case the mainframe is already capable of producing such tax returns on its own per 26 USC 6020(b) as an enforcement tool called "Automated Substitute For Return" when people fail to file now. People would pay a bit more initially due to systemic shock but without ways to game it as it would be an almost flat tax it could be made revenue neutral fairly quickly.

This is why I execute the policy and do not write the policy. I haven't had to brave an election. Merely getting hired on and surviving a single year's probation was all I had to do.

I'll continue running my own email server from my home regardless. Then, when the revolution comes and the heads of the imperialist swine Google, Facebook, and Microsoft are impaled on sticks stuck in the sand for the people to spit on, I'll just look up from my teletype long enough to say "welcome back; hope you learned your lesson" and go back to work.